In order to provide highly available services that incur minimal to no outage, several leading telecommunications and computing companies have formed the Service Availability Forum (SA Forum). The SA Forum has defined standard middleware services including the Availability Management Framework (AMF) (see, Service Availability Forum. Application Interface Specification, Availability Management Framework, SAI-AIS-AMF-B.04.01) to enable the development of highly available systems and applications. This middleware service manages the components composing an application by shifting, for instance, the workload from a faulty component to its redundant components. The software/hardware components, their types, their relations, and the services that the application is composed of are given in a configuration file, referred to as the AMF configuration.
The AMF concept may also be used to manage availability for a system that is not highly available, or a system that is highly available with respect to only a portion of its services. For example, in a banking service system the bill viewing service may be available at 99% (which is not highly available), but the transfer service is available at 99.999% (which is highly available). A user may specify these availability requirements as part of user requirements among other user requirements for service provision. The user requirements are used to derive configuration requirements for generating the AMF configuration. Due to the complexity of the AMF domain, it is generally not recommended to create an AMF configuration manually.